I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! As usual, I prefer Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they like.

2018 was one crazy year full of highs and lows for me, but overall a huge improvement over the last couple of years, more than I could ever have expected! But it has also been extraordinarily busy and I haven’t really had as much time to work on the websites as I wanted, even though the creative energy was there. There might not even be an end-of-year roundup because there’s not that much to talk about, but perhaps I’ll get around to do it when I get back home.

Like last year, I’m not actually home right now but with my family in Berlin – and that means the only fresh content from me will be my photos over on the Photography Blog, where I’m still posting every day. As always, you can also follow me on Google+ (until April at least), Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get everything from me in one place.

Have a nice end-of-year holiday, everyone – I’ll see you all around the Internets at some point or other! :-)

I haven’t written much about Google+ lately, mostly because it just seemed to be working well and while it was a bit more quiet than before, it still was a pleasant social network with many unique features. But in early October, Google dropped a bombshell of epic proportions: following an undisclosed and covered up security leak, Google+ will be shut down slowly over the next ten months.Sometime in August 2019, Google+ will cease to exist. [Update December 10: It gets even worse. Today Google has announced in another blog post that Google+ will be shut down in April next year, not in August because another security bug has been found…]

This is something I never, ever expected to be happening. Google+ had lost a lot of its popularity recently and has been declared dead or a ghost town by many, but for a large loyal group of users, especially photographers, it was the social network of choice. Evidently Google doesn’t think much of those people, some of who were invited to special communities and programs like Google+ Create and others. Kicking everyone out with ten months’ of notice is at least halfway decent, but still feels like being betrayed. In the original announcement Google claims that Google+ “has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds” – but what about the other 10%? How many users are that? Millions? Tens of Millions? Evidently not enough.